1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic messaging and more particularly to type-ahead processing for electronic messages in a messaging client.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic messaging represents the single most useful task accomplished over wide-scale computer communications networks. Some argue that in the absence of electronic messaging, the Internet would have amounted to little more than a science experiment. Today, electronic messaging seems to have replaced the ubiquitous telephone and fax machine for the most routine of interpersonal communications. As such, a variety of electronic messaging systems have arisen which range from real-time instant messaging systems and wireless text pagers to asynchronous electronic mail systems.
Electronic mail, a form of electronic messaging referred to in the art as e-mail, has proven to be the most widely used computing application globally. Though e-mail has been a commercial staple for several decades, due to the explosive popularity and global connectivity of the Internet, e-mail has become the preferred mode of communications, regardless of the geographic separation of communicating parties. Today, more e-mails are processed in a single hour than phone calls. Clearly, e-mail as a mode of communications has been postured to replace all other modes of communications, save for voice telephony.
It is well understood that an e-mail message before transmission must be addressed to at least one recipient. The most basic e-mail clients permit the end user to manually specify an address—either a specific e-mail address formatted for Internet transmission such as john.doe@mycompany.com, or by alias such as John Doe/New York/MyCompany. More advanced e-mail clients support an address book and the use thereof in selecting one or more recipients for an addressee of an e-mail. In this instance, an address book entry, once selected for insertion into an addressee field of an e-mail message can be transposed into an e-mail address, or can be represented by the address book name of the addressee such as John Doe and translated at the time of transmission into an Internet address such as john.doe@mycompany.com.
Type-ahead processing has become part and parcel of the modern e-mail client. Type-ahead processing refers to the auto-completion of a manually specified recipient in an addressee field of an electronic message under composition. The typical program logic supporting type-ahead processing monitors the entry of characters in an addressee field of an electronic message under composition and compares the characters to entries in a table of known addressees—whether that table is a table of addresses previously specified for previous messages, or whether that table is an address book populated by entries provided by the end user or an administrator of an organizational directory. As the logic locates one or more entries in the table, a best matching entry, or even a selection of some or all of the matching entries can be provided in a list for the end user to select a single entry to be inserted in the addressee field as the intended recipient of the message.
Type-ahead processing remains critical for most end users whom have become accustomed to the convenience afforded by the type-ahead processing function. Notwithstanding, limitations remain in the ability of type-ahead processing to satisfy the unique circumstance of specifying multiple different addressees in an addressee field. At present, to accommodate multiple different addressees, type-ahead processing handles one addressee at a time. Alternatively, type-ahead processing can recall the name of a pre-defined group of addressees where such group had been previously defined, for example “ALL STAFF” or “ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT”. In any event, to accommodate multiple different addressees in a message under composition, the end user must remember all desired addressees to receive a message under composition though in the past the end user may have already specified a complete listing of the desired addressees for the message under composition.